Trump’s hush money payments trial to start April 15
Former U.S. president Donald Trump will stand trial April 15 on charges related to hush money payments meant to cover up claims of marital infidelity, a New York judge ruled Monday, tersely swatting aside defence claims of prosecutorial misconduct.
Assuming the date holds, the decision from Judge Juan M. Merchan ensures that the prosecution will be the first of four criminal cases against Trump to reach trial, with the presumptive Republican nominee facing a jury in the city where he built a business empire decades ago and gained celebrity status.
The trial had been in limbo after a last-minute document dump caused a postponement of the original date. In setting jury selection for April 15, Merchan bristled at what he suggested were baseless claims by Trump’s lawyers that prosecutors intentionally failed to pursue tens of thousands of pages of records from a federal probe covering the same issues.
Prosecutors said only a handful of those newly released records were relevant to the case. Defence lawyers contended thousands of pages are potentially important and require painstaking review. Merchan, who this month postponed the trial until at least mid-April, told defence lawyers that they should have acted sooner if they believed they didn’t have all the records they felt they were entitled to.
Trump wasn’t harmed by the recent provision of material and the prosecutors who turned it over were not at fault, Merchan said.
Outside the courtroom, Trump complained about the ruling, characterizing the case — as he has done repeatedly — as an act of “election interference.”
“This is a case that could have been brought three and a half years ago. And now they’re fighting over days because they want to try and do it during the election. This is election interference. That’s all it is. Election interference and it’s a disgrace,” the former president said.
The hearing took place on the same day that a New York appeals court granted Trump a dose of good news by agreeing to hold off collection of his $454 million US civil fraud judgment — if he puts up $175 million within 10 days.
The two developments underscored the extent to which New York, the city where Trump was born and raised, has emerged as an epicentre of his criminal and civil jeopardy. Though the hush money case filed last year by prosecutors in Manhattan is seen as involving less serious accusations than his other prosecutions — which charge him with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally retaining classified documents — it has taken on added importance given that it’s the only one that appears likely for trial in the coming months.
Monday’s hearing centred on a documents dispute that had threatened to delay the case for additional weeks if not months.
Trump’s lawyers had complained that their preparations were being hampered by the late arrival of evidence from the 2018 federal investigation that sent his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to prison.
Prosecutors denied any wrongdoing and blamed Trump’s lawyers for bringing the time crunch upon themselves by waiting until Jan. 18 to subpoena the records from the U.S. attorney’s office — a mere nine weeks before jury selection was supposed to start.
They also said there was little new material in the documents trove. Matthew Colangelo said in court Monday that the number of relevant, usable, new documents “is quite small” — around 300 records or fewer.